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Category: Elizabeth Warren

Securities and investment firms have poured nearly $65 million into her campaign coffers, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Goldman Sachs employees have donated $284,816 to Clinton and just $3,641 to Trump, who has received $716,407 from Wall Street.

Elizabeth Warren very poignantly explains how money destroys our democracy. This is just one tiny example how money influenced the vote over one bill. This happens thousands of times a day all through Washington.

What the average citizens fails to realize is that money will never get out of politics. Witness McCain-Feingold. A 2002 bill with bi-partisan support that promised to curb the influence of big money politics. Does anyone think “Big Money” has left politics?

Brad Smith, former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission said, “campaign finance “reform” is a disaster. “What we’ve done is, we’ve created a system in which it’s harder and harder to engage in real grass-roots activity,” “That’s what these laws are in real-life practice.” They sound good in theory, but in actuality they have the reverse effect they were intended to have. But politicians feel good and voters keep voting for more and more regulations.

So the little guy is left out in the cold while “Big Money” creates Super-Pacs and hires lawyers to get around the law. This is just one example of how the Big get BIGGER. We have the seen the same thing happen with with finance reform. The Big Banks got bigger. Why is that you might ask? For the exact reason Ms. Warren correctly points to, the “Big” institutions can lobby. Now people like the Koch brothers and George Soros are more influential than ever.

After the collapse of the credit markets in 2008, elected government legislators authored another massive bill, Dodd-Frank, it resulted in the Big banks getting BIGGER yet again. How can that be you might rightly wonder. Because when elected officials seek to right some wrong, perceived or otherwise, they do not understand how the the finance system or any other free-market enterprise for that matter operates. They have usually spent their time first in law school, then they run for office. They have little, if any real world knowledge of business. So they seek the advice of … you guessed it… the leaders of the “Big” institutions, the very same people they are attempting to regulate. It is like the fox guarding the hen house. Imagine the referee of a sporting game asking the head coach of one of the teams to help make a play call. These leaders offer up a lot of ideas that do nothing to help protect the average citizen, in fact the rules they propose crush the little guy.

That is why instead of seeing an uprising of small local regional banks and credit unions after the crash, we instead witnessed many of them vanishing, even though, they, for the most part, did not make any risky loans. The Big banks saw to it their new regulations would end the competition.